Exam Profile: Core Solutions of Microsoft Lync Server 2013 (70-336)

This article walks the user through the Microsoft Core Solutions of Microsoft Lync Server 2013 (70-336) exam, meant for IT professionals who design, plan, deploy, and maintain unified communication solutions. Pearson IT Certification provides a variety of exam preparation tools to help our customers in their quest for certification. As part of our service to you, we have developed this Exam Profile series. Each profile is developed based on the testing experience of one of our trainers or authors. You won’t get exact questions or answers, but you will get a real feel for the exam. Each profile describes question forms, trouble spots, hints for exam preparation, and recommendations for additional study resources. Find out what you can expect to see on the exam and how you can better prepare for it.

The 70-336 exam is meant to be taken by those who are IT consultants and telecommunications consulting professionals who design, plan, deploy, and maintain solutions for unified communications (UC). Those who take this exam should be able to translate business requirements into technical architecture and design for a UC solution. It is recommended that you have a minimum of two years of experience with Microsoft Lync technologies and should be proficient in deploying Lync Server solutions for end users, endpoint devices, telephony, audio/video and web conferences, security, and high availability. Candidates should also know how to monitor and troubleshoot Lync Server using Microsoft tools.

In addition to the information above, you should be proficient with Active Directory Domain Services, data networks, and telecommunications standards and components that support the configuration of Lync Server. Candidates should be familiar with the requirements for integrating Lync Server with Microsoft Exchange Server and Office 365.

To be minimally qualified to take this exam, you should have experience making decisions concerning the design, implementation, and maintenance of the following: Central and branch office sites; Standard and Enterprise edition deployment; High availability and disaster recovery; Remote Access\External access; Enterprise voice; Unified Messaging; Conferencing; Persistent Chat; Data compliance; Client endpoints; Migration from previous versions of Lync.

Exam Details

Number of Questions: Approximately 45-55 questions (Since Microsoft does not publish this information, the number of exam questions may change without notice.)

Types of Questions: This test format is multiple choice and multiple choice multiple answer. You may also see several scenario questions.

Passing Score: 700

This passing score does not mean that you must answer 70 percent of the items correctly in order to pass the exam. The actual percentage varies from exam to exam and may be more or less than 70 percent. There is no penalty for guessing. No points are deducted for incorrect answers. If a question specifies that you must choose multiple correct answers, you must choose the exact number of correct answers specified in the question in order to earn a point for that item. Some of the questions on the exam may not count toward the calculation of your score. Microsoft will often throw a question in that is meant to gather data that will help them improve the exam.

Time Limit: 120 minutes

Trouble Spots

As with any exam, it will vary from person to person as to what is deemed to be difficult. Be sure you are familiar with each of the topics in the exam objectives listed below.

An SIP trunk is an IP connection that establishes a SIP communications link between your organization and an Internet telephony service provider (ITSP) beyond your firewall. An SIP trunk is typically used to connect your organization’s central site to an ITSP. It may also be possible to use SIP trunking to connect your branch site to an ITSP.

Conferences are secure and confidential because users who join using the Lync client, Lync Phone Edition, or Lync mobile client are already authenticated using Active Directory.

Lync includes support for Windows PowerShell, which can be used to automate many administrative tasks. If you understand how to use PowerShell, you can be more efficient and effective performing these tasks.

Monitoring communication services is necessary in order to ensure that end users are getting the desired service. You can use the monitoring features in Lync to determine if performance or outages are affecting communication services. Synthetic transactions allow you to quickly and easily determine real-time communication services health by performing transactions on client computers that simulate typical actions performed by users (such as initiating conference calls). Synthetic transactions provide an accurate representation of the end user experience. You can also use the Active Monitoring feature. This feature monitors resources to ensure they are adequate to support the current demands, including pools, servers, and available network bandwidth. If you are also using System Center 2012 or System Center 2007 R2 Operations Manager, you can monitor Lync health. Operations Manager provides centralized alerting of health issues and logging so that you can resolve issues before they affect user performance or availability.